If you have to use Perl, a) don’t feel bad about having trouble understanding it sometimes, everybody else does too, and b) there is an operator that’s extraordinarily difficult to google. If you happen to run into it, in Perl =~ returns true if the value on the left matches the regex on the right and false if it doesn’t.

That type of operator is called a binding operator and if you’re lucky and you already know that it becomes possible to google it. If you don’t, it’s kind of a terrible experience. Seriously, try googling “perl =~ operator” It takes some serious digging to find any useful results.